Autism: The Wall That Knows No Limits

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There was one girl who said that her reaction to Mike "coming out" about his autism was "Okay, so that's why you act that way, that's fine, but you can still act like a normal human being like everyone else" or something similar to that. Her name was LynAnne. I thought it was funny because the nice girl Lindsey was listed as "Mike's friend" during her first interview clip while the stupid girl was listed as "Has known Mike for 6 years". I wouldn't want to be LynAnne's friend either.

I thought it was a good video. One thing that they could also focus on is some of the abilities that many of us have that are not generally found in the NT population.

It was okay. Nothing ground breaking or earth shattering. I thought the autistic guy's "friends" were kind of annoying, especially that fat girl in the second video. Did she really have to roll here eyes every two seconds while talking about how "weird" the guy was? I think it's the NTs like her who need some sensitivity training. Meh.

i found the background music too distracting to watch more than a few minutes of it.

26 minutes. I shudder to think how many MB's that will take up, I'm near the end of my allocated GB's, and I'm not going to download that many all at once...

I thought it was an excellent video. I understand it's not going to be everyone's experience, but honestly what is?

I'm really curious... what do some people (including the OP) seem to dislike about it?

I don't know about everyone else but for me I feel it's the fact that most of people on that video were not seeing AS through AS eyes. You can do all the damn research you want and could know everything about the symptoms but in the end you cannot truly give a "whole" opinion on a subject unless you "live" that subject, in a manner of speaking (e,g. You can only speculate on what happened during a particular period of time in a particular place unless you were actually there).

But I suppose in the end each person's experience with AS is personal to themselves; I still say that it's a bit assumptive of these NT's to declare themselves an authority on AS, maybe I would feel differently if I didn't have it.

That's the point, though. To give different perspectives. It's not a video about what it's like to have autism. It's a video about autism. And it shows different perspectives. It has a person with autism saying what it's like to have autism. It has friends and aquaintances saying what it's like knowing, and interacting, with someone with autism. It has professionals giving what autism is like from their perspective.

As far as the two professionals (the teacher, and I'm guessing the other one deals with autistics in a clinical setting, as a person who works with autistics, they are able to make generalizations about autism that a person with autism cannot. As individuals with autism (or autistic traits) we can each give what autism is like for ourselves. But, as the saying goes, if you've seen one person with autism, you've seen one person with autism. Professionals that work with autistics are in a position to know what traits are autism, and what traits are an individual's particular quirks, and to talk about autism from that perspective of what's common.

Now, if you aren't interested in that, that's fine. That doesn't make it bad video. Just not something you are interested.

As for the perspectives of the friends, I personally liked that best. (Not so much "known him 6 years" girl in part 2, though I didn't mind her. Note, I've so far watched the first two parts.) That comes, though, from the perspective of being of, well, in my case, being a friend of a sort of a person, not perhaps with autism, but with definite autistic traits. And my frustration with that, with understanding him, with the communication between us, with his failures in how he's interacted with me. And there's very little out there about being friends with someone with autism. So, I really liked that.

I can see I guess that that's not something most people here are going to value much. They are sharing, after all, what autism looks like from the outside (and not with the plus of being able to generalize) and what it's like to interact with someone autistic, not what autism is like.

I wonder, are their any videos out there that combine different perspectives on what it's like to be autistic? That is, that have more than one autistic person sharing their experiences. It's seems like all the ones I've seen are just one person. Including this one... only one person sharing what it's like to have autism.